An Absence of Light

They both sat down and started turning through the photographs. There were forty-eight of them.

“The stippled effect on some of them is actually the spray coming from the fountain,” Arnette said, picking up a photographers loop and putting it on a photograph that was lying flat on the table. She put her eye right on the loop. “They must’ve been soaked by the time they finished talking.”

Graver went through the four dozen photographs rather quickly, setting aside the ones in which the unknown man did not appear. The ones in which he did appear Graver then examined again more closely using the loop. The photographer had done a good job of getting the unknown man’s face from several different angles as well as straight on. He appeared to be, as Arnette had said, in his late fifties. Shorter than Burtell, he was also heavier, though not obese. He was wearing a suit without a necktie, his shirt collar undone. His hair was thinning, but he kept it neatly parted and combed. Even though the photographs were in color, it was difficult to determine anything about his complexion or hair color because the lights of the fountain reflecting off the water and the beige granite gave an overall distorted cast to the photographs. He had a slightly bulbous nose and, in one photograph, a noticeable mole on the right side of his chin. He would have had trouble shaving around it.

Sometimes the man talked to Burtell while looking away, and the expression on his face did not change in any of the pictures. Once the photographer caught him looking back and up at the high curtain of water that almost surrounded them, and it was easy to see that his baldness was generalized over the top of his head.

“What do you think?” Arnette said after a while.

Graver shook his head. “Just a guy.”

“He’d disappear in a room with half a dozen people,” Arnette said. “He looks like a ‘government’ guy.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Graver said, still looking at the photographs.

Arnette didn’t say anything. She sipped her coffee, looked at a photograph.

“They didn’t see him arrive?” Graver looked at her.

“No. He just came across the grass and was there. Left the same way. In fact, we tried to catch him leaving, but we just flat missed it We would have had a better chance if we’d gotten out of the cars, but we decided against risking it.”

Graver looked at the man in the picture with a degree of frustration that he found difficult to hide. This was nothing. What could he do with it? Where did it get him? No matter how much he looked at this man’s face, it wasn’t going to tell him any more than he could apprehend in the first few minutes. It was like having a fingerprint before the existence of the national fingerprint index. There was nothing to compare it with. There was no national index of faces.

“There’s one thing,” Arnette said. “We think we see some countersurveillance there.”

Graver looked at her.

“Yeah, no kidding,” she said. She turned sideways and reached for the photographs Graver had set aside. She riffled through them, quickly arranging them in some specific order, and then held them up one by one so that she and Graver could look at them together. “The reason there are so many prints of the crowd is to check for this kind of thing.” She picked up a pencil from the table to use as a pointer. “These shots were taken while Dean was strolling around the sunken lawn area. He made one full circle, eating sunflower seeds.”

“Sunflower seeds?”

“Yep. See this couple here? They’re walking together as Dean arrives.”

At the mention of the word “couple,” Graver felt his face flush as he leaned closer in to the photograph, braeing himself against the recognition of the man and woman from La Facezia. He focused on the woman whose face lay under the tip of Arnette’s pencil. He stared at her. He did not recognize her. He focused on the man to her left. The face was not familiar.

“Dean starts walking along the grassy mall from the west end of the fountain,” Arnette continued. “They meet him at this moment, but they’re looking away at something. They pass by, Dean keeps going toward the north end of the lawn. The couple stops at the west side of the fountain to watch some kids throwing a Frisbee down on the sunken lawn. This gives them a view of the entire lawn area with Dean circling.”

Arnette’s pencil touched the faces on another photograph. Graver leaned in again, studying the man and woman from another angle. He simply does not recognize the faces. He is relieved, but puzzled. If he had been given the chance to bet that they would be the same couple from La Facezia, he would have done it.